Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

Tolkien wrote:The mental power of image-making is one thing, or aspect; and it should appropriately be called Imagination. The perception of the image, the grasp of its implications, and the control, which are necessary to a successful expression, may vary in vividness and strength: but this is a difference of degree in Imagination, not a difference in kind. The achievement of the expression, which gives (or seems to give) ‘the inner consistency of reality’,[31] is indeed another thing, or aspect, needing another name: Art...
[31]That is: which commands or induces Secondary Belief.
OFS §§65-6

The quotation is supplied by @Troelsfo on another thread, where he has accepted my challenge to explain the intended meaning of the phrase 'the inner consistency of reality.' Troelsfo draws attention to the footnote, which establishes that whatever is the quality of 'inner consistency of reality' it may be understood from the side of Secondary Belief, which this quality commands or induces. Stepping out of our debate, I wished to highlight how significant are each of Tolkien's words in this essay, and how easily in our reading we may step over vast chasms of meaning.

As a frame on the essay, it is worth holding in mind that it was composed in two parts: as a lecture, delivered March 1939, which material was then reworked - with the entire section 'Fantasy' inserted anew - in summer 1943. These dates (courtesy: Flieger & Anderson) correlate with those of Christopher Tolkien in Return of the Shadow and Treason of Isengard to show that the man who delivered the 1939 lecture had penned the adventures with Tom Bombadil pretty much as we know them but had not advanced beyond Rivendell, while the man who wrote up the essay in summer 1943 had at the close of 1942 brought the story to the breaking of the staff of Saruman - through Moria, Lorien, Fangorn, and Rohan and Isengard.

Consider the words of the footnote in the context of the story just penned: the Lady of the Golden Wood induces belief but would never command it! Wormtongue cannot command belief, but induces it. The voice of Saruman is an enchantment.

Between commanding belief and inducing belief is all the difference between the storyteller and the White Wizard, on the one hand, and Sauron on the other.

Once again you have my head churning @Chrysophylax Dives.

Between commanding belief and inducing belief is all the difference between the storyteller and the White Wizard, on the one hand, and Sauron on the other.

The difference between "command" and "induce" is a fine line, but it appears important to Tolkien, and a line that at least his characters should not cross. I'm too unfamiliar with Tolkien the "Storyteller" to delve into how he composed his stories, but perhaps it will be helpful to know on the subject of "commanding" and "inducing," I'm reminded of Gandalf's confrontation with the Balrog in Moria:

"I do not know," answered Gandalf. "But I found myself suddenly faced by something that I have not met before. I could think of nothing to do but to try and put a shutting-spell on the door. I know many; but to do things of that kind rightly requires time, and even then the door can be broken by strength." (The Fellowship of the Ring: The Bridge of Khazad-dum)

The way Gandalf describes using "magic" (for lack of a better term) here is interesting. He can "try" to put a shutting-spell on the door, but to do it "rightly requires time." Or to put it in the terms of "Seconary Belief," Gandalf is attempting to induce the door into being shut, by putting a "shutting-spell" on it. However, this does not work:

"What it was I cannot guess, but I have never felt such a challenge. The counter-spell was terrible. It nearly broke me. For an instant the door left my control and began to open! I had to speak of word of Command. That proved too great a strain. The door burst in pieces."

Gandalf had induced the door shut, but the Balrog countered and Gandalf lost control of the door. In haste he had to speak a "word of Command." However, as Gandalf describes the door pretty much exploded, because the word to "Command" the door shut was too great a strain for it. This takes us back to Bag End, where Gandalf tells Frodo he can't "make him" destroy the Ring. Or rather that he could, but would not cross that line:

Gandalf laughed grimly. "You see? Already you too, Frodo, cannot easily let it go, nor will to damage it. And I could not "make" you - except by force, which would break your mind." (The Fellowship of the Ring: The Shadow of the Past)

Now I shall head to bed thinking about Frodo's mind exploding into pieces like the door of Moria, if Gandalf had decided to cross that line and "Command" Frodo to destroy the Ring. Cheers!

Boromir88 wrote: ↑Sat Jan 29, 2022 5:01 am "What it was I cannot guess, but I have never felt such a challenge. The counter-spell was terrible. It nearly broke me. For an instant the door left my control and began to open! I had to speak of word of Command. That proved too great a strain. The door burst in pieces."

You honed in on the line that these days holds me above all others. A word of Command! What does that mean? (This must be the power of Bombadil.) What is this two-step magic and what the nature of the opposing spells? The doors of Moria are not to be taken lightly; there is a riddle on the western door and this Chamber of Records has two doors. And note this: the Doors of Durin redraw the frame of The Hobbit: the door that is marked (Bag-end) and the door that is hidden (Lonely Mountain) made into one door that is first unhidden (Gandalf's magic here is rather passed over with hand movements) and then studded with queer marks and signs.

The door that breaks prefigures (or is that the opposite) the bridge that breaks; all spelling out more of the latent meanings on which the wizard first stumbles, on the dwarf door on which Celebrimbor drew the signs. (The door that breaks is not in the movie! I looked for it, but the Tomb has only one door - in my heart I believe that this captures a fundamental way that Jackson does not get his material.)

And, in my opinion, you precisely place your finger on the point by drawing attention to the door of Moria and the mind of Frodo Baggins (and ours!) This is at the heart of things, it seems to me.

Aiks, yes Prof. Tolkien was remarkably intelligent. Looking back, I think i was disappointed when i went to university because i was expecting to find some teachers like him, but there were none to be had!

The green text is from the essay On Fairy-stories. You can read it online here: https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com ... ories1.pdf. From my own experience, though, it takes many readings to comprehend what is going on in the essay. I came to a careful reading of the essay through my research into the HoMe volumes dealing with the early drafts of LOTR, which reveal that this essay is part of the composition - it contains the inner core of the new vision that bursts into the story in Moria and Lorien and gives us also Orthanc and the Seeing Stone (Tolkien wrote up the essay immediately after Wormtongue hurled the Stone of Orthanc into the story, but he worked the essay up from a lecture that he delivered in 1939, before arriving at the Doors of Durin.)

But that inner core is so very hard to discern. Tolkien almost goes out of his way to hide his meaning; or perhaps it is because he is talking so directly that we find it so very hard to see what he is saying?

Quite early, Tolkien says that his subject, 'Fairy', cannot be defined, yet may be perceived. This is just such an odd idea. I think almost all readers simply step over it with eyes closed - because what else can you do? But here is an important signpost for an essay composed by a man whose first job was working on the Oxford English Dictionary: the essay on fairy stories is a sort of appendix to the OED directing attention to a realm of being that is (somehow) nameless yet visible.

Aiks, feel free to raise any comment or question as you read. As @Romeran said on another thread, it is a very dense essay; and it is often hard to see the connections; but just about every part of it is significant.

Aiks, it makes me very happy to read your first report on OFS. Now you have read the essay a first time, here are a few pointers that i have worked out over the years.

1. The first section implicitly follows a conventional Oxford approach to definition, whereby one begins by looking at all the things that are called X, rejecting some as not really X, and thereby arrive at a theory or definition of what X is. In other words, there is more of a method at work here than one first suspects - and the method concerns words and their meanings or definitions - and yet the conclusion is that, while fairy stories can be defined as stories that touch on Fairy, 'Fairy' itself cannot be defined.

2. Observe how, after stating that 'Fairy' cannot be defined, Tolkien offers the suggestion that it may be 'translated' as 'Magic', but then, much later, in the section 'Fantasy' he retracts this translation, offers instead 'Enchantment' and declares that Magic is what evil magicians do. This strange 're-translation' is i think at the heart of things, and has a clear parallel in the LOTR when Sam says he wants to see 'real elvish magic' and Galadriel explains the difference between her art and the deceits of the Enemy.

3. But think on this: Lorien endures in History because Galadriel wields one of the Three, which though untouched by Sauron are - by way of the story of Celebrimbor and his 'friend' who taught him much lore - as near as elvish art can get to Magic. Ultimately, I suggest, OFS shows us that Sam's expression was correct - Lothlorien is at its roots 'elvish magic' and when Frodo offers Galadriel the Ring, Galadriel herself must acknowledge this. But this is a big reading perhaps better drawn out in full elsewhere.

4. The section 'Origins' is the (usually overlooked) key to the essay and to Tolkien's 'philosophy' in general. Tolkien says that when we engage in 'fantasy' by joining words to make new ideas we already have an enchanter's power, on one plane. Scholarly readers of the essay prefer to ignore this, but it seems to me that Tolkien is saying that language is magical and that, as speakers of language, we mortals have ourselves 'magic' power. In a nutshell, magic is found among us in our use (and abuse) of language - or to spell it out in full in light of the double translation of 'Fairy': with our magic we may discover the Divine face within us by sub-creative fantasy = telling fairy stories; or with our magic we may dominate, oppress, delude, cheat, and spin webs of fake news and propaganda.

5. The section 'Children' is concerned with a few things. Firstly, Tolkien is struggling against a late 19th-century academic reading of History in which humanity has advanced from 'primitive' or 'savage' to enlightened western mind. Such presuppositions prompted the late Victorians to read fairy stories as the stories from 'the childhood of mankind'. Tolkien thinks this is nonsense: he thinks that people always tell fairy stories, though our stories today are certainly different from those of our distant ancestors. But at the same time in this section, Tolkien is grappling with the introduction of the Necromancer into the center of the sequel to The Hobbit, which he recognizes means that he is writing a fairy story that is not quite suitable for children.

6. There is a modern scholarly edition of the essay (edited by Flieger and Anderson) that presents not only the 1947 essay but also the earlier drafts, allowing us to see the change from the 1939 lecture in Scotland to the essay penned in summer 1943. What comparison reveals is that the whole section 'Fantasy' is new. This section is generally considered to hold the theoretical core of the essay, which suggests that these ideas were clarified in Tolkien's mind as he penned the story from Moria to Isengard. As with Sam and Galadriel, so more generally the essay and the story are intimately bound together.

7. Having reached the end of the section 'Fantasy' most readers are exhausted but it is actually in the last discussion of the use of fairy stories that the essay opens up and provides a key to the story of LOTR. For example: the account of Theoden's bewitchment by the words of Wormtongue, of Gandalf's calling on the king to take courage so he can offer counsel, of the king's subsequent encounters with hobbits and ents - the stuff of the fairy stories of Rohan, which spur his recovery such that Theoden can see through the enchantment of the voice of Saruman. Here we have the blending of the old northern theory of courage with Tolkien's idea of magic and enchantment, such that the value of fairy stories is properly placed in the correct order of recovery from necromancy: courage - counsel - fairy story: recovery. This in my opinion is the deepest theme of LOTR, and may be found not just in Rohan but throughout the story, at least as it concerns mortals.

Aiks, perhaps i was at university a few years later than you (i was born in 1968). my disappointment with what i found prompted me to do a PhD on late 19th-century English thought, which i found more interesting than what was offered a century later. i was looking at a young 'moral scientist' (as they were then called), named Alfred Marshall, who later became a famous economist. one thing that i found was that in the early 1870s, when still a young man, Marshall dedicated two or three years to intensive study of history - reading everything that was then recently published. By transcribing all his notes from this reading i came to understand the importance of the discovery of prehistory to our understanding of who and what we are. In fact, it was by tracing the subsequent development of ideas of European prehistory that I arrived back at my childhood author, Tolkien and his seemingly unique vision of the tribes of the ancient North. Gradually I came to see that Tolkien the storyteller had much more to say about life and reality.

To engage with just a couple of your points. On the 'drama': it is to me a sign of the poverty of understanding of Tolkien that people who claim to know his thought well argue about the merits of the 'movies' without making recourse to this discussion of drama in OFS. Tolkien is trying to say something about thought (mind pictures) and language (sounds or letters that embody meaning); what he says about drama applies no less to movies: the direct communication of meaning by image is an art best left to the elves, and when attempted by mortals either falls flat or falls into magic. (I'm not saying this is correct, only that Tolkien's essay provides a framework for thinking about movies in relation to books, but i have never once seen anyone attempt to use it.)

On point 6. I quite understand your reply. I'm not here attempting to persuade you that the two step composition of OFS is interesting, merely indicating why I am caught up on it, which in a nutshell is because the same two step composition is evident in the making of LOTR. Put crudely, the 1939 lecture on fairy stories might be correlated with The Hobbit and the adventures of four hobbits in the realm of Tom Bombadil; while the essay OFS composed in 1943 correlates with what happens in LOTR from Moria on. It is not as if there are two utterly different stories, nor are lecture and essay utterly unconnected. Clearly, the story after Moria was drawn out (in some way) from the story with Tom Bombadil; and clearly the essay was drawn out of the lecture. But there is, as it were, a missing step: something magical appears in both essay and story, something that seems like it was not there and yet, i am certain, is drawn out of what was there.

Not sure that last makes sense, but it was what i was drawing with the stone in the study that appears in March 1939 in my short story about the curious affair of Peregrin Boffin.

Aiks, and i will take a guess that your story will be about the Minyár? I look forward to reading it. I know you read my story about Peregrin Boffin because you left a nice comment on it! Here is a little bit of background on that story to tie together a couple of points in our conversation.

Already in the story that Tolkien composed in 1938, when the hobbits reach Bree they meet a wild ranger in the Prancing Pony - but he was a hobbit who wore shoes. In 1939 Tolkien considered making this hobbit a descendant of Elendil but eventually decided that he was indeed a hobbit, named Peregrin Boffin, who was Bilbo's other favorite nephew but, inspired by Bilbo's stories, had run off into the blue and disappeared from the Shire. But when he started writing again in late summer 1940 Tolkien finally had the story that we know before him, and the Ranger at Bree became a man, the heir of Elendil - and so the story of Numenor became a foundation of the new hobbit story (and Peregrin Boffin vanished!).

But at first this Ranger was not called Aragron. When the Company first arrived at Lorien his name was 'Ingold son of Ingrim', with Ingold subsequently crossed out and replaced by 'Elfstone'. Tolkien notes on his manuscript that the 'Ing'-element stands for the 'West'. Here, I think, is one of many places where we glimpse Tolkien's vision of the story of Numenor as the original origin myth of the ancient northern tribes. If you look carefully, from the earliest Silmarillion stories on there are within the stories various Ings and Ingwes or characters who can stand for them in their actions - primarily crossing the shoreless western sea.

By the way, on 'moral scientist': in 1848 at Cambridge University in England it was possible to take only two subjects: Classics and Mathematics. The modernization of the university began with the establishment of two new faculties: the natural sciences and the moral sciences. The moral sciences were comprised of various disciplines that, over the next few decades, became independent faculties: philosophy, psychology, political economy, law and history. Because these disciplines were still lumped together the resulting scholarship was in many ways more interesting than today, when there is vigorous specialization in the academy and it is common for an expert in one field to be quite ignorant in a related field. Tolkien stands at the cusp of the change: today he is claimed by the philologists and also the medievalists, but really, while he was indeed an expert in these fields, he is one of the last whose mind was not constrained and confined by disciplinary borders.